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Phoenix666 writes:

In Africa, Swahili has mama and baba . In the Philippines, Tagalog has nanay and tatay. Fijian has nana and tata. Mandarin, so intimidatingly different from English to the learner, soothes unexpectedly in offering up mama and baba. Chechen in the Caucasus? Naana and daa. Native American languages? Eskimo has anana and ataata; Koasati, spoken in Louisiana and Texas, turns out to have mamma and taata; down further in El Salvador, Pipil has naan and tatah.
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The answer lies with babies and how they start to talk. The pioneering linguist Roman Jakobson figured it out. If you're a baby making a random sound, the easiest vowel is ah because you can make it without doing anything with your tongue or lips. Then, if you are going to vary things at all, the first impulse is to break up the stream of ahhh by closing your lips for a spell, especially since you've been doing that to nurse. Hence, mmmm, such that you get a string of mahs as you keep the sound going while breaking it up at intervals.

Babies "speaking" in this way are just playing. But adults don't hear them that way. A baby says "mama" and it sounds as if he's addressing someone—and the person he's most likely addressing so early on is his mother. The mother takes "mama" as meaning her, and in speaking to her child refers to herself as "mama." Voilà: a word mama that "means" mother. That would have happened with the first humans—but more to the point, it has happened with baby humans worldwide, whatever language they are speaking. That means that even as the first language was becoming countless others, this "mama mistake" was recreating "mama" as the word for "Mom," whatever was going on with words like mregh.

Papa and dada happened for a similar pan-human reason. After babies begin making m with their lips, they pick up making a sound that involves a little more than just putting their lips together—namely, putting them together, holding them that way for a second, and then blowing out a puff of air. That's p—or, depending on your mood, b. Alternatively, babies also start playing with their mouths a little further back from the lips—on that ridge behind the upper teeth that we burn inconveniently by sipping soup when it's too hot. That's where we make a t or a d. The order in which babies learn to make sounds explains why the next closest usual caretaker to mom is so often called papa or baba (or tata or dada).

Hmm, wonder how they explain similarities in the word for "beer?"

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Phoenix666 writes:

An un-named Casino with next-to-no security has lost 150,000 credit cards after being raided by a new hacking group.

Researchers Emmanuel Jean-Georges and Barry Vengerik of Mandiant and FireEye say the "Fin5" hacking group had last year skipped through the organisation's "flat" IT architecture to raid its open payment systems.

They say the casino lacked even basic firewalls around its payment platforms and did not have logging.

"It was a very flat network, single domain, with very limited access controls for access to payment systems," Emmanuel Jean-Georges told the Cyber Defence Summit (formerly Mircon) in Washington DC today.

"Had this casino hotel operator had even minimal or basic protections in place like a firewall with default deny systems to limit access to PCI (payment) systems ... it would have slowed down the attackers and hopefully set off red flags."

Sigh. So much easy money out there for those with no scruples.

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fliptop writes:

There's been speculation for quite some time that U.S. school districts would have to start making tough decisions to pay for their employee's health benefits. Some started cutting hours to limit liability under the ACA. Others challenged the law in court.

In what was described as "the straw that broke the camel's back" a rural Tennessee district with 3 schools has voted to shut down their facilities:

Clay County, Tennessee operates three schools total – one high school and two that cover pre-kindergarten through eighth grade – on a $9.5 million budget. However, now more than 1,100 students are sitting at home while officials try to figure out how to reopen the doors. A school board meeting last week saw the board voting 6-4 to close the schools. A separate vote to keep them open failed.

Notably, the county's financial issues are not new. Clay County Director of Schools Jerry Strong told Associated Press that officials have been struggling with the budget for three years, and blamed county obligations such as state and government mandates, particularly the Affordable Care Act, for the monetary hole.

"Clay County's inability to generate the revenue to offset the mandates is what's caused this to come to a head," he said.

"The straw that broke the camel's back was really the Affordable Care Act for us and it has made it very difficult for us to have our employees properly covered and meet the mandates of the law. That was going to require new revenue and the commission felt like they couldn't do that through a tax increase."

Phoenix666 writes:

OpenStack has gained considerable popularity over the years for its open-source cloud platform, but this week it looks like one major user is seriously considering dropping the technology in favor of a proprietary alternative.

U.K.-based telecom giant BT Group said it will switch to a different option for delivering virtual enterprise services, according to a Wednesday report in Light Reading, unless OpenStack can address its concerns regarding six key areas: virtual network functions, service chain modification, scalability, security, backward compatibility and what's known as "start-up storms" when numerous nodes all come online at the same time.

"If these six issues are not addressed, we will not use OpenStack for virtual enterprise," Peter Willis, BT's chief researcher for data networks, said at the SDN & Openflow World Congress going on this week in Germany, according to the report.

BT has not committed resources to resolving those 6 issues for the OpenStack community.

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Phoenix666 writes:

In a development that could revolutionize electronic circuitry, a research team from the University of Wisconsin at Madison (UW) and the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory has confirmed a new way to control the growth paths of graphene nanoribbons on the surface of a germainum crystal.

Germanium is a semiconductor and this method provides a straightforward way to make semiconducting nanoscale circuits from graphene, a form of carbon only one atom thick.

The method was discovered by UW scientists and confirmed in tests at Argonne.

"Some researchers have wanted to make transistors out of carbon nanotubes but the problem is that they grow in all sorts of directions," said Brian Kiraly of Argonne. "The innovation here is that you can grow these along circuit paths that works for your tech."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Computerworld has an article about the migration of enterprise IT from company-owned data centers to third-party clouds, and what it means to IT workers. Traditional concerns such as capacity planning and managing the physical aspects of a data center are now passé - companies now let Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and their competitors deal with those issues, and can provision virtual servers on the fly to handle spikes in demand.

So what kinds of job skills are needed now? The Computerworld article is scant on details, but this article from Cloud Computing News mentions AWS, Linux, Python, and being handy with popular virtualization and system configuration management tools such as Docker, Puppet, and Chef.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Intercept has published The Drone Papers, an 8-part series of reports on classified documents obtained from an anonymous whistleblower:

The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military's assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama's drone wars.

Part 1: The Assassination Complex

The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret slides that provides a window into the inner workings of the U.S. military's kill/capture operations at a key time in the evolution of the drone wars — between 2011 and 2013. The documents, which also outline the internal views of special operations forces on the shortcomings and flaws of the drone program, were provided by a source within the intelligence community who worked on the types of operations and programs described in the slides. The Intercept granted the source's request for anonymity because the materials are classified and because the U.S. government has engaged in aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers. The stories in this series will refer to the source as "the source."

The source said he decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the U.S. government. "This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them 'baseball cards,' assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong," the source said.

[...] "The military is easily capable of adapting to change, but they don't like to stop anything they feel is making their lives easier, or is to their benefit. And this certainly is, in their eyes, a very quick, clean way of doing things. It's a very slick, efficient way to conduct the war, without having to have the massive ground invasion mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan," the source said. "But at this point, they have become so addicted to this machine, to this way of doing business, that it seems like it's going to become harder and harder to pull them away from it the longer they're allowed to continue operating in this way."

[More after the break.]

Phoenix666 writes:

If you've been wondering about the server performance in your Cisco Business Edition 6000/7000 telephony system, wonder no more: The Borg has issued a field notice that the system shipped with misconfigured RAID.

The Cisco field notice advises sysadmins that the correct settings for the kit are as follows:

Read Ahead Policy = Always
Write Cache Policy = Write Back
Strip Size = 128KB

The factory configuration error exists in the BE6000M, BE6000H, BE7000M, and BE7000H appliances that shipped with the Cisco BE 6000 and 7000 telephony systems.

If you have an affected system, you've probably noticed something like this: "Installations of Cisco Collaboration applications from ISO (disk image) files directly located in the local datastores might take six to seven times longer than normal. For example, a Cisco Unified Communication Manager installation will take six or more hours versus the typical one hour install time."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The BBC reports on advice posted by Polizei NRW Hagen:

A German police force has warned parents against posting photographs of their children to Facebook publicly. The pictures could be copied and altered by paedophiles or simply prove embarrassing to the children in later life, Hagen Police said, in a message on their own Facebook page.

Parents were advised to ensure that privacy settings allowed only their Facebook friends to view the photos. The advice has been shared nearly 200,000 times.

[...] Child protection charity the NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) said in a statement: "All parents should feel free to enjoy taking photos of their children and sharing them with friends and family. However, we should all be careful when posting photos online. "We know that sex offenders are able to doctor innocent family photos of children, and developments in photo editing software have made this easier. "So if parents do publish photos of their children online, they should take care to ensure that they have checked their privacy settings and are happy about who can see and share them."

The statement added that if parents were worried a photograph of their child had fallen into the wrong hands, they should contact the Internet Watch Foundation, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) or NSPCC helpline on 0808 800 5000.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The tiny transistor is the heart of the electronics revolution, and Penn State materials scientist have just discovered a way to give the workhorse transistor a big boost, using a new technique to incorporate vanadium oxide, one of a family of materials called functional oxides, into the device.

"It's tough to replace the current transistor technology, because semiconductors do such a fantastic job," said Roman Engel-Herbert, assistant professor of materials science and engineering. "But there are some materials, like vanadium oxide, that you can add to existing devices to make them perform even better."

The researchers knew that vanadium dioxide, which is just a specific combination of the elements vanadium and oxygen, had an unusual property called the metal-to-insulator transition. In the metal state, electrons move freely, while in the insulator state, electrons cannot flow. This on/off transition, inherent to vanadium dioxide, is also the basis of computer logic and memory.

The major challenge they faced was that vanadium dioxide of sufficiently high quality had never been grown in a thin film form on the scale required to be of use to industry, the so-called wafer scale. Although vanadium dioxide, the targeted compound, looks simple, it is very difficult to synthesize.

In order to create a sharp metal-to-insulator transition, the ratio of vanadium to oxygen needs to be precisely controlled. When the ratio is exactly right, the material will show a more than four-order-of-magnitude change in resistance, enough for a sufficiently strong on/off response.

In a paper in the online journal Nature Communications, the Penn State team reports for the first time the growth of thin films of vanadium dioxide on 3-inch sapphire wafers with a perfect 1:2 ratio of vanadium to oxygen across the entire wafer. The material can be used to make hybrid field effect transistors, called hyper-FETs, which could lead to more energy efficient transistors.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Ana Swanson writes in the Washington Post that when people talk about "disruptive technologies," they're usually thinking of the latest thing out of Silicon Valley but some of the most historically disruptive technologies aren't exactly what you would expect and arguably, the most disruptive technologiy of the last century is the refrigerator. In the 1920s, only about a third of households reported having a washer or a vacuum, and refrigerators were even rarer. But just 20 years later, refrigerator ownership was common, with more than two-thirds of Americans owning an icebox. According to Helen Veit, the surge in refrigerator ownership totally changed the way that Americans cooked.

"Before reliable refrigeration, cooking and food preservation were barely distinguishable tasks" and techniques like pickling, smoking and canning were common in nearly every American kitchen. With the arrival of the icebox and then the electric refrigerator, foods could now be kept and consumed in the same form for days. Americans no longer had to make and consume great quantities of cheese, whiskey and hard cider -- some of the only ways to keep foods edible through the winter. "A whole arsenal of home preservation techniques, from cheese-making to meat-smoking to egg-pickling to ketchup-making, receded from daily use within a single generation," writes Veit.

Technologies like the smartphone, the computer and the Internet have, of course, dramatically changed the ways we live and work but consider the spread of electricity, running water, the flush toilet developed and popularized by Thomas Crapper and central heating and the changes these have wrought. "These technologies were so disruptive because they massively reduced the time spent on housework," concludes Swanson. "The number of hours that people spent per week preparing meals, doing laundry and cleaning fell from 58 in 1900 to only 18 hours in 1970, and it has declined further since then."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Online TV company Netflix gained another 3.62m subscribers between July and September, to take its total to 69.17m.

However, the number of new subscribers in the US was less than the company had forecast, prompting shares to fall in after-hours trading.

It attributed this to the "ongoing transition to chip-based credit and debit cards".
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Netflix has been doing a fair bit of gambling lately.

First, it took the not-unanimously-popular decision to remove thousands of films from its catalogue in favour of spending money on original programming. And then last week it said it was going to up its prices as well.

Slow user growth in the US will worry investors - although the company has blamed the transition in the US to chip cards, rather than waning interest. Internationally there were more new subscribers than anticipated, suggesting the chip excuse may be a valid one.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Techrights has published a copy of an e-mail regarding apparent collusion between M$ and the European Patent Office (EPO). The e-mail is from Grant Philpott, the principal director for information and communications technology at the EPO, and states that late Microsoft files should be treated with the highest priority. It means specifically that they shall be treated before any other late file, even from European applicants or any small applicants.

Original Submission

darkfeline writes:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/windows-10-upgrade-installing-automatically-on-some-windows-7-8-systems/

Our own testing shows that, yes, the optional update is getting chosen by default, and that's not supposed to happen to optional updates.

For those not wanting to make the switch to Windows 10 just yet, all is not lost; the installer does require human intervention to actually proceed, so you won't run the risk of waking up to find your PC running a different operating system. If you're not paying attention, though, you may find yourself upgrading sooner than you expected.

We've asked Microsoft what's going on, and the company tells us that enabling the update was done accidentally:

As part of our effort to bring Windows 10 to existing genuine Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 customers, the Windows 10 upgrade may appear as an optional update in the Windows Update (WU) control panel. This is an intuitive and trusted place people go to find Recommended and Optional updates to Windows. In the recent Windows update, this option was checked as default; this was a mistake and we are removing the check.

Original Submission

ticho writes:

Publicly traded enterprise software company Red Hat has acquired devops software startup Ansible for more than $100 million, VentureBeat has learned.

Written mostly in Python, Ansible's open-source software has gained popularity, but the startup also offers premium Tower software and consulting services. The software allows developers to more easily set up and manage IT infrastructure for applications at scale. For instance, Ansible can speed up the rollout of OpenStack Ceph storage software across companies' data center infrastructure, according to a recent blog post from Red Hat.

Original Submission